


Wings Like Noah's Dove

by Maidenjedi



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-24
Updated: 2014-12-24
Packaged: 2018-03-03 05:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2839427
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Larry Underwood comes back to Boulder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wings Like Noah's Dove

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marien/gifts).



> Despite the length, this is a treat - I saw the prompt and had to go with it. Hope this works. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> (ETA - the title is from 'Fare Thee Well (Dink's Song)'. I listened to it on almost perpetual loop while writing this.)

"W-who goes there?"

A rifle clicked, audible even over the gathering storm, and he felt pure terror for the first time in weeks, possibly months. He limped closer to - was that a _barbed wire gate_ , for chrissakes? - and waved his arms. "Don't shoot guys. Don't shoot!"

_Would be awfully funny if I survived all of this only to be shot outside Boulder, Colorado by a skinny kid with a rifle bigger than he is...awfully fucking funny_

"Oh shit. Oh shit. Larry? Is that Larry Underwood?"

Indeed, my good sir. Indeed. "Yes, yes it is! Is that Billy? Gehringer?"

"Ah-huh, Larry, it's me." He climbed down from his post and scurried over to Larry, put his arm under Larry's and nudged him along. "I can't believe it's really you."

They limped along to the gate and Billy let him go. Larry shuffled through, bone-weary, but anxious to get home.

Home.

Billy pulled on his arm. "Larry."

"Mmm." He knew exactly what Billy would ask.

"Is there...did anyone else?"

The look on Larry's face was answer enough.

-

Tom Cullen had reached Boulder three days before Larry, and most of the town knew the basics. Vegas was toast. If there were survivors, they hadn't lasted long. Flagg had been prepared to gas them, nuke them, invade, whatever (it changed depending on who was telling the story), and poof. Tom hadn't known what happened to Stu, or Glen, or Ralph, or even Larry. 

When Tom walked into town and Lucy heard about it, she collapsed and had to be carried to the hospital. She was still there when Larry walked into town, and she was the last to know he was back.

He came into her room quietly; she was sleeping, on a light sedative despite her much heavier belly. Larry collapsed on the floor next to her bed, sobbing.

When she woke, he was in a chair, his hands clasped before his lips, his eyes shut, and he was whispering what sounded distinctly like the Lord's Prayer.

"Larry?" she said, a wondering, disbelieving note in her shaky voice. "Am I dreaming? Are you real? Larry?"

He opened his eyes and Lucy saw that he was crying, and she reached for him. He went to her and held on.

-

_"It has to be this way. We go on. You don't."_

_"This is sick, it's fucking sick. Who would want it to go this way? We're in this together, aren't we? Stu, aren't we?"_

_Stu looked down at Larry's busted ankle and slowly shook his head. "Not from here, we're not."_

-

He told her what happened, slowly, incompletely. She didn't need to know everything, about Harold on the roadside, pistol still in his mouth, or about how Larry had felt the earth shake when the nuke blew and how he felt his friends leave that same earth as surely as he knew his name. 

How it came to be that his ankle wasn't busted, just horribly sprained, and how he'd been able to limp and then crawl a full mile before finding a car he could rig to glide into the nearest town.

But he told her most of it. How the decision to leave Larry hadn't been his, how Glen and Stu had been matter-of-fact up until the last, how Ralph had cried. 

Larry wanted to tell her the worst of it, how he still wasn't sure that he'd pushed enough, that he didn't just give in to Stu because he knew what was in front of them and he didn't want to face it, oh no. Better let them handle it, Stu and Glen and Ralph, who were all braver, better men.

Better than Larry.

"And Glen and Ralph and...Stu went on. I...they went on."

_A chickenshit, yellow bastard to the last. You ain't no nice guy._

"Shhh, Larry. Shhh. You couldn't know what would happen to them. They did, you did what was right. And now you're home and we, we're going to be parents, and Larry I just, I love you, I love you, I love you."

Lucy was the one crying now, and Larry wiped the tears as best he could and held her. 

-

He spent time with the doctor, a new man he was unfamiliar with and therefore somehow more comfortable. "Well, Larry, you lucked out, the way you describe it. That fall should have busted your leg, maybe sprung your knee. But all you have is a sprain that hasn't truly healed. I'm ordering you to take it easy, and we'll dig you up something for the pain if you think you need it, but otherwise, ice it and stay off it as much as you can."

"That's all?" Larry knew it was. And that gave him the same twisted, sick feeling in his gut that Stu's parting speeches had. _"This is it, Larry. We're going. We have to finish this."_

"Ayup." A Maine man, apparently, was Dan Lathrop. This made Larry think of what else he had to do, before he left the hospital to take the longest nap imaginable. 

"Doc, is Fran Goldsmith still here?"

-

Billy had filled Larry in on Fran, after giving him the news about Lucy. The baby had been born, Fran was still at the hospital though she was just fine. And that's all Billy would really say, though Larry would admit he didn't press too hard.

_Dead, or dying. The flu._

So, after obtaining permission and making sure that Lucy was taken care of, assuring her that this was something he could handle and that he wouldn't be gone long, Larry went looking for Fran.

She was in a private room, which was painted a supposedly soothing shade of pink. Mauve, his mother would have said. It was obviously a room for giving birth and for nursing a child. Though, when he got there, Fran was alone. A mother without her child, or anyone else. He knocked, though the door was open. The nurse in the hall, Marcy, had told him Fran may not be up for visitors, that she really hadn't seen anyone, not even Lucy for more than a few minutes at a time. 

"Frannie?" he said, tentatively. 

She looked up from a book in her lap. Her face reflected every emotion she could have in the space of a minute - surprise, disappointment, curiosity, anger.

And realization. The full, complete knowledge that if Larry Underwood had darkened her door unaccompanied after so many months, it was because he was alone, and now so was she. Really and truly.

She let out a moan, a keening, mournful sound that rang out and pierced Larry. It was so familiar, that sound. He knew it from his waking nightmare.

He took a step toward her and she recoiled, a hand now over her mouth. She got out of bed and went to stand at the window, her back to him. She was silent now, and the sounds in the room couldn't overcome it. It frightened him more than the moaning had.

He cleared his throat, knowing he owed her something, some kind of explanation, even if she wouldn't, couldn't look at him or acknowledge his presence again.

"There was...I think it was a nuke. It had that...there was...you know. The wind blew the other way. I...."

He was stumbling over the words too badly, and so he stopped talking. Fran began to sob, she put her hands over her face.

She turned, suddenly, nearly stumbling. Larry winced.

She just looked at him, tears still coursing down her face. She shook her head, slowly, in an unconscious imitation of how Stu had reacted to Larry's pleas not to be left in the desert.

"Fran. He wanted to come home. He wanted it, I wanted it. It shouldn't have been me, I know that, don't you think I know that?"

She shook with her sobbing now, and the moan was back, softer. She hiccupped and she held out her hands.

Larry stepped toward her and took them. He leaned closer and their foreheads touched. And he wasn't surprised to find he was crying as well.

-

"And the baby?"

Fran sighed, picking at the blanket. After a long, mutual cry, she sat back on the bed, and Larry'd taken a chair. She began the conversation by offering up information about Boulder, after. She didn't ask questions; Larry offered little in return. It could keep.

But now they came to the question that had haunted Stu in his final days, Larry knew. What about the baby?

Fran pinched her eyes shut and answered. "Sick. They won't tell me anything, but he's sick. He has it. Captain Trips."

Larry whispered, "Fuck," and balled his hands into fists. All of that, all of _that_ , for what. For fuck's sake, what was it all for?

_Glen's voice, over the campfire, late one night early in their quest. "Humanity may yet find a way. Two immune parents, they might produce an immune child. We won't know, not yet. One immune parent may even be enough."_

_Stu: "May. Not will. We won't know."_

_Glen: "Stu, let us be baldly honest, in these our probable last days. We will never know."_

Larry thought of Lucy, and her swollen stomach, and he reached out for Frannie's hand once more and they sat there until the sun was long set, in mutual silence and grief.

-

It was late that night, too late for either of them to be awake and yet they could not sleep, that Larry told Fran his worst fears.

And Fran, stern-faced, told him hers.

When the sun rose, and Fran fell asleep mid-sentence, trying to reassure Larry, he got up to go home at last. He looked down at her and sighed.

“It shoulda been Stu. But I will be here, for you and for Lucy, if it’s meant to be.”

He left, whispering a prayer once again.

-

_Mayday_

Peter, he was called, was a darling child to all who knew about him. He was the First, and you could hear the wonder in the voices of Free Zone residents both new and old. 

Not the first child, of course, in this new world. 

The first survivor.

Lucy's twins - Larry still could not wrap his mind around that - would be the other Firsts. Assuming they survived, and Larry refused to entertain any other idea, they would be the first children born to superflu-immune parents in this world. It was hard to imagine, given the sheer number of survivors. Boulder had grown to more than nineteen thousand residents, and Larry, a New Yorker who had shaken off the need to feel surrounded, felt it was almost too big.

Lucy felt the same way. And so they had begun to plan to leave, next spring, after the thaw and the babies were big enough to travel.

And now Lucy had taken Fran aside, and they'd left Peter in Larry's uncertain care so Lucy could recruit Fran into coming with them.

"I need her, Larry," she'd said to him, when they were working out the idea. "It was just us, you see. Just her and I. And she would...she couldn't handle being left behind again, I don't think."

Larry, who'd spent more than one night listening to Fran talk about all the things she missed in this new world, Stu being chief among them, and holding her when she broke down crying and needed to be held, agreed with Lucy.

He looked down at Peter, who was lying on his stomach and pushing up. That tiny face recalled his dead father, Larry knew, perhaps even more than Fran had been willing to say, but Larry looked at him now and saw Stu looking up at him.

_"Take care of her, Larry. Tell her. I didn't want to go." Stu's eyes were bright and his hands shook ever so slightly as he clasped Larry's. "I don't want to go."_

_"None of us do, Stu. None of us do," said Ralph, pulling Stu's hands from Larry's._

_"We will go on. And so will Larry." Glen came up and put a hand on Larry's shoulder. "Tell them. One of us had to be the messenger, don't you see? He always needs a prophet, or a storyteller. You will be ours."_

_"Take care of her, of Frannie. Don't forget, please, Larry."_

Peter sneezed, surprising himself and bumping his nose on the ground. The blanket was plenty soft and Larry knew he wasn't hurt, just surprised. Larry wasn't the best with kids, he knew that, but Peter responded to him, and sure enough, when he picked Peter up, the cries subsided.

"We'll take care of her together, bud. Won't we? Won't we, now?"

Peter grinned a slobbery, toothless baby grin, and Larry felt the sun on the back of his neck. Somewhere not too far away, Tom Cullen could be heard singing loudly with a group of children who all called him Uncle and begged for horsy rides.

And here came Frannie and Lucy, smiles on their faces, and the traces of tears on Frannie's.

It was a good day.

\----


End file.
